Front Trends 2016 in Warsaw: Day 3

Summarizing the third day presentations of the Front Trends 2016 conference in Warsaw, including the Nyan cat, pixel bonding, modern(izer) tools, CSS engineering principles, Origami, offline pages, real programmers and Trojan CVs.. A speakers list can also be found on 2016.front-trends.com/speakers/.

If an interface is more human, it allow us to be more human.—Tammie Lister

Use of tools inside the new version of the Modernizr website and downloader: Service workers, clipboard.js, download binary blobs of service-worker-generated files, decent markup, custom Modernizr versions via npm install,

Subtitle: "Considerations for building front end systems". Alice leads a team whose aim is to unify and DRY frontend work at the Financial Times (project "Origami".

On the different FT branded websites, there are a lot of things which have been implemented differently, even on atomic scale (4 implementations of a close button which looks the same, 3 different Twitter icons).

First step was to use components to keep HTML, CSS, JS for one thing in one place (this seems to be a hot topic this year).

The websites also have different tooling, which should be unified so all websites (implemented in different languages) can use the same components.

You can move the JS to bower packages, for example. But for (customizable) HTML templates or CSS ths is more complicated. So they implemented a build service that "everyone" can use to request Origamis CSS, JS and HTML. People liked using it, but the documentation was not good. -> I wish it was more like bootstrap.

And: they created a documentation styleguide(!), whcih includes a communication plan for new releases, incident reports, ...

The Guardian's Native app caches articles offline, to provide content even if the user (or the servers) are offline. The website is not available offline. Oliver built a prototype for an offline page in less than a day! And provided a detailes step-by-step walkthrough on how it works.

Great talk about what seems to be expected from "good programmers" today, and what really is.

We don't need to know everything, finding a niche is cool. This is not a test. Real developers use resources wisely. Code has not to be perfect or even correct on the first try (or at all). Learn from mistakes. Show your work, not only your finished and polishes products. Encourage each other. We don't have to code all the day and everyday. Being a developer does not have to kill your hobbies (or parentship).

My biggest professional development was admitting what I don't know.
— Jessica Rose